I am watching the clock, 3 minutes past the hour, and Marcus is mid-sentence, but his eyes have already left the room. He’s looking at me, or rather, through me, waiting for a nod that hasn’t come yet. It’s that split-second hesitation where the human spirit flinches, looking for an external compass before it dares to take another step. I’ve seen this look in the eyes of people coming off 13 years of heavy substance use, and I’ve seen it in the eyes of executives making 333 thousand dollars a year. It’s the same flinch. It’s the sound of a man who no longer trusts his own feet to find the floor without a second opinion.

I just sent an email to my entire client list about ‘Self-Sovereignty’ and, in true Lucas fashion, forgot to include the PDF attachment I spent 3 days designing. It’s a stupid mistake, a glitch in my own operating system, but there’s a brutal irony in it. Here I am, a coach, failing at the basic admin of coaching, while my clients are treating my every word like it’s carved into stone. They are waiting for me to tell them if their own feelings are ‘correct.’ They are treating their intuition like a draft that needs my red pen before it can be published. It’s a dependency we don’t talk about because it’s profitable, and because it feels like ‘progress’ to the person being led.

Training Humans to Be Terriers

I remember a dog I had, 23 years ago, a scruffy terrier that would wait by the door for a specific whistle before it would eat. Even if the bowl was full of the most expensive meat, the dog would sit there, starving, waiting for that one specific sound. We are training humans to be that terrier. We are creating a culture of seekers who are so addicted to the ‘process’ of growth that they have forgotten how to actually grow. They are 43 sessions deep into a program and they still can’t decide what to have for breakfast without checking if it aligns with their ‘vision’ as curated by a consultant.

Dependency is a quiet thief.

I once spent 63 days in a row thinking I was making massive breakthroughs because I was finally ‘listening’ to my mentors. In reality, I was just replacing my own chaotic noise with their polished noise. I wasn’t getting better; I was just getting better at echoing. It took a massive, public failure-the kind that costs you 13 thousand dollars and a lot of sleep-to realize that my mentors weren’t there when the floor fell out. I was the one who had to stand up, and I didn’t know how because I hadn’t practiced standing without a hand to hold.

This is the core frustration I see every day. People come to me because they are tired of feeling lost, but what they really want is for me to be their new GPS. They want to outsource the anxiety of choice. If I tell them what to do, and it fails, it’s my fault. If it succeeds, they owe me their life. It’s a win-win for the ego and a lose-lose for the soul. We are terrified of our own experience. We treat our lives like a case study that someone else is more qualified to grade. We look at resources like Day One Careers and we hope to find the secret code, the 3 steps to bypass the discomfort of being ourselves. But the real value isn’t in the code; it’s in the realization that you are the one who has to type it in. You are the one who has to stand in that interview room, or that boardroom, or that recovery meeting, and own the space you occupy without looking for a thumbs-up from the sidelines.

The Business of Insecurity

I’m not saying coaching is useless. That would be a lie, and I’m 73 percent sure I’d be out of a job. But the goal of any real helper should be their own obsolescence. If I haven’t made myself redundant in your life within 13 months, I have failed you. I have become the very crutch I told you to throw away. The problem is that the industry isn’t set up for obsolescence. It’s set up for ‘retention.’ It’s set up for the 3-year contract and the upsell to the masterclass. We have professionalized common sense to the point where people feel they need a certification to breathe deeply.

Let’s talk about the ‘Permission Slip’ culture. It’s this idea that your lived experience isn’t valid until it’s been validated by a ‘professional.’ I had a client tell me once that she felt 83 percent more confident after our session, not because she learned anything new, but because I told her that her instincts were ‘valid.’ That’s terrifying. Why does my opinion of her instincts matter more than the instincts themselves? It’s because we have been conditioned to believe that we are inherently broken and that the ‘fix’ is always outside of us. We are the only species that pays to be told how to be what we already are.

Embracing Your Own Data

There’s a specific kind of freedom that comes when you stop trying to ‘optimize’ your life and start actually living it. It’s messy. You’ll make mistakes that end in 3. You’ll send 13 emails without attachments. You’ll fail in ways that are 100 percent your fault. But those failures will be yours. They won’t be the result of a ‘system’ you bought into; they will be the raw data of your own existence. And that data is more valuable than any 3-step program I could ever sell you.

The Optimized Stranger

We need to stop asking if we’re ‘doing it right’ and start asking if we’m doing it at all. The coach can point at the moon, but they aren’t the moon. And if you spend all your time looking at the finger, you’re going to miss the light. I want my clients to walk out of a session and not think about what I said. I want them to walk out and feel the weight of their own choices. I want them to feel the 3 pounds of pressure it takes to pull a trigger on a big decision and know that the hand doing the pulling is theirs and theirs alone.

What If You Had No Whistle?

So, here’s the provocation. What if you didn’t have a coach? What if you didn’t have a mentor, a guru, or a 3-step guide for the next 23 days? What if you were forced to rely entirely on the 3 things you know for sure about yourself? It would be terrifying. You would probably make 3 mistakes before lunch. But they would be your mistakes. And the lesson you would learn from them would be burned into your nervous system in a way that my ‘advice’ never could be.

I’m going to go back and send that attachment now, but I’m going to include a note: ‘Here is the file I forgot. It doesn’t have the answers you’re looking for. Only you do.’ It’s a small gesture, probably 3 percent of the effort required to actually change a life, but it’s honest. And in an industry built on the illusion of certainty, honesty is the only thing that actually heals. We don’t need more permission. We need more presence. We need to stop waiting for the whistle and just start eating the meat. The bowl is already full. It’s been full for 13 years. You just haven’t looked down yet.